Setting the Time To Die
Gen. 9:5 states: "But for your own life-blood I will require a reckoning..." Torah Temima takes this statement not only to prohibit suicide, but as the biblical proof text that those who take their own lives do not inherit the world to come.
Rabbi and ethicist Elliot Dorff writes against the idea of assisted suicide because he believes that it is the lack of communal support and pain control that drives people to want to take their own lives. Pain control can be provided, he claims, and lack of communal support is our own obligation.
In Atul Gawande's new book, Being Mortal, he makes the case that nursing homes are built on a medical model to take care of illness but not to provide a meaningful life, and that most assisted living homes do not provide meaningful lives for their residents as they were founded to do.
I am wondering how you feel about this. Should we allow people to take their own lives when they are in pain or alone, isolated and lonely? Do each of us have an obligation to reach out to those who are alone and perhaps sick, particularly people who have shared our lives for many years? Should we each prepare more for meaning to our lives in our old age? Many people tell me that when their spouses die or they move into assisted living, they lose their previous friendships. People just fade away.
Are these questions you are asking yourself, and what's your thinking?

GOD'S PEOPLE!
Written Torah is referred to as "the interpreted text." Oral Torah, the Talmud, midrash and all of rabbinics, is the interpreter text. Judaism implemented a unique and revolutionary system. While maintaining the absolute constancy of "the interpreted text," an immutable Torah embodied in each Torah scroll, the Torah remains fluid by being interpreted to apply anew to every age. On Simchat Torah we celebrate this divinely inspired system that has enabled the Jewish people to live immortally, in every land and age, by the immutable yet ever adjusting Torah. We live diachronously attached to Torah, preserving the constancy of the Jewish view and interpretation of the world. But simultaneously Torah interacts with and interprets all current events. Jews are the people who view reality through the prism of Torah. Whether the pursuit of justice, or dancing with the Torah scrolls, or blessing our children Erev Shabbat, or welcoming LGBT Jews into the community in a new and God conscious way: Jews ask "What does the ever ancient but ever-renewing Torah teach me about the eternal principles inherent in our current reality?" By preserving Torah God touches our lives even as we live in the real world daily. We willfully give our lives as God's instruments in the world. In so-doing, we become God's people.